Extra notes about Chapter 4: About Pleasure – in the book
The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent.
Other notes are found here.

Quotes

Why use bitter soup for healing
when sweet water is everywhere?
– Rumi

Our culture has a sphincter over too much fun. We’re a little afraid of it – we are afraid of it. Well we probably should be afraid of it, because it means all bets are off. Once you start having too much fun you will change your entire life. Why? Because your hormones will change.
– Christiane Northrup (Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom)

You don’t have to be a sadomasochistic sex enthusiast to know that pleasure and pain can be felt simultaneously. . . In the lexicon of cognitive neuroscience, both pleasure and pain indicate salience, that is, experience that is potentially important and thereby deserving of attention. Emotion is the currency of salience, and both positive emotions like euphoria and love and negative emotions like fear, anger and disgust signal events that we must not ignore.

. . . It is tempting to speculate that the addition of pain to pleasure creates a super-salient response in the medial forebrain and that this somehow contributes to the popularity, in some quarters, of sadomasochistic sex, or even of tasty food loaded with chili peppers.

While we normally experience orgasm (and everything else, really) as a unified perception, these results [of a brain study] revealed that orgasm has in fact dissociable sensory/discriminative and pleasurable/emotional components that are mediated by separate brain regions.

– David J Linden (The Compass of Pleasure)

Books

Pleasure Activism: the Politics of Feeling Good, by adrienne maree brown

The Compass of Pleasure, by David J. Linden

Ecstacy is Necessary: A Practical Guide, by Barbara Carrellas